The girl is in the desert.

Before she found the Pacific Black Duck eggs, a dozen matches left now.

She is huddled beneath a Desert Stringybark. A light rain began with the arrival of morning and she has positioned her bottle at the bottom tip of a large leaf, water collecting in a slow stream. She camped for the night close to a small spring, wary of who else might be drawn to it. There are rusted cans and shrivelled wrappers left in the fire pit. Tyre tracks not yet erased by wind.

The girl is arranging stones. She woke before the rain, her nose alert to its imminence, and, as she always does upon waking in the desert, sought out the presence of others. In the canopy above her. On the ground below. This morning it was an Emu with his six stripy chicks. They were picking their way through the dawn vegetation, the chicks so well camouflaged in the filtered light that at first she did not see them. As she crouched behind a Holly Grevillea, quiet as her heart would allow, she watched him herd his offspring away from her, the girl a member of a species that few trust.

Afterwards, she went in search of stones. She found them beneath a trail of Black Box, evidence of the water that once flowed through here, the stones tumbled and weathered by its passage. The girl collected them in the fold of her shirt and brought them back to her camp.

She positions the stones, one after the other, in a grouping similar to a constellation she saw last night. She knows the male Emu is the one who will raise the chicks until they are ready to fend for themselves, and he will do everything he can to keep them from harm. This is not something she has lived. A stone is neither a guardian nor an answer, but sometimes placing them in different patterns hints at the right question, or eases the strangeness in her gut.

Not always.

Not this day.